Rakudo Star Release 2016.01

2016-02-03

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce
the January 2016 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2016 release is available
from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This is the first post-Christmas (production) release of Rakudo Star and
implements Perl v6.c. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module
tests pass on supported platforms).

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional with the
JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM backend only.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and
specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". This Star
release includes release 2016.01.1 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version
2016.01 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources
collected from the Perl 6 community.

Some of the new compiler features since the last Rakudo Star release include:

Chained .grep calls on Supply fixed (RT #127297)

Fixed interaction with perl6-debug and precompilation that resulted in an
endless loop

re-enabled warning when smart-matching against a True or False literal

Auto-generated meta-ops vivified by referring to them, instead of executing

Illegal assignment of different Numeric values now caught at compile time

&nextcallee implemented, which returns the routine that nextsame would invoke

Many speedups

Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:

Bailador: The PSGI module by default now sets p6sgi instead of psgi

DBIish: Many fixes

Digest::MD5: Updated to conform to new newline handling

doc: p6doc -l added. p6doc now works for most non-core docs with pod

LWP::Simple: Replace "as Int" with proper coercion type to fix build

Linenoise: Many fixes

MIME::Base64: Adjust to pack being made experimental

panda: Large number of precomp and other bug fixes. Now depends on 6.c

Template::Mojo: use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL

Shell::Command: removed "as"

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

non-blocking I/O (in progress)

some bits of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's
backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many
that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources.
Perl 6 tutorials are available under the "docs" directory in
the release tarball.